Eliana Willis

Kerry Wan/ZDNETI love my Apple Watch. It’s with me wherever I go, whether that’s to the gym for my (almost) daily workout or to the office so I can check my notifications at a glance. I like switching between the different watch faces, trying to find the right band to fit my style, and replying to messages with the surprisingly accurate QWERTY keyboard on my wrist. Occasionally, I’ll even crack open an app to manage my to-do list or check the tides at Lakes Bay in Atlantic City.Also: The Apple Watch SE is finally seeing an $80 discount again for the first time in 2025I can do all these things on a computer strapped to my wrist, which I still find wildly impressive each time I put on the Apple Watch. But the one thing that’s driven me crazy for months is the thing that keeps it all running: battery life.Each time I upgrade to a new version of WatchOS, my battery life seems to go from lasting as long as two days on a single charge to barely making it through one. Why? I have no clue. Maybe it’s the higher demand on the processor or perhaps Apple didn’t optimize it properly. Also: Apple’s WatchOS 11.3 clobbers updates for older Apple WatchesExperiencing these Apple Watch battery woes only tempts me to ditch it and buy an Apple Watch Ultra 2 More

Christina Darby/ZDNETI am someone who gets headaches — a lot. And sometimes, no matter what over-the-counter medication I take or herbal remedies I try out, they just won’t go away. Desperate to find a solution to the migraines that would render it impossible to write, I bought the Renpho Heated Eye Massager More

 “When you are 50 or 70 times faster than the competition, you can do things they can’t do at all,” says Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman. Tiernan Ray/ZDNETAI computer pioneer Cerebras Systems has been “crushed” with demand to run DeepSeek’s R1 large language model, says company co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman.”We are thinking about how to meet the demand; it’s big,” Feldman told me in an interview via Zoom last week.DeepSeek R1 is heralded by some as a watershed moment for artificial intelligence because the cost of pre-training the model can be as little as one-tenth that of dominant models such as OpenAI’s GPTo1 while having results as good or better.The impact of DeepSeek on the economics of AI is significant, Feldman indicated. But the more profound result is that it will spur even larger AI systems. Also: Perplexity lets you try DeepSeek R1 without the security risk”As we bring down the cost of compute, the market gets bigger and bigger and bigger,” said Feldman. Numerous AI cloud services rushed to offer DeepSeek inference after the AI model became a sensation, including Cerebras but also much larger firms such as Amazon’s AWS. (You can try Cerebras’s inference service here.)Cerebras’s edge is speed. According to Feldman, running inference on the company’s CS-3 computers achieves output 57 times faster than other DeepSeek service providers. Cerebras also highlights its speed relative to other large language models. In a demo of a reasoning problem done by DeepSeek running on Cerebras versus OpenAI’s o1 mini, the Cerebras machine finishes in a second and a half, while o1 takes a full 22 seconds to complete the task. More

Jason Hiner/ZDNETThe Apple Pencil Pro More

ZDNETThough we’re well past the holiday deals season, don’t worry. Major retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart More

Maria Diaz/ZDNETAmazon has been focused on bringing generative AI to Alexa for the past few years, hitting multiple delays in launching new features that the company first announced in September 2023. The deferred Alexa 2.0 seems poised for a 2025 release, as evidenced by the surprise Devices and Services event Amazon is hosting at the end of the month.Amid rumors of Alexa 2.0 shortcomings, Amazon skipped its 2024 Devices and Services event, where the company typically announces new Alexa features and hardware devices. Now, the company plans to host an Amazon Alexa-themed event, where it is expected to unveil the voice assistant’s generative AI features and finally put an ETA on its launch.Also: 5 ways AI can help with your taxes – and 10 major mistakes to avoidThe event, which will take place on Feb. 26 in New York City, will be Panos Panay’s first since joining the Devices and Services division after his Microsoft exit. But aside from new Alexa features, Amazon could be preparing to launch other devices.What to expect from Amazon’s February 2025 event More

ZDNETSometimes, a family member or friend will contact me asking for technical help with their iPhone. Often, I can solve the problem or address the question by talking them through the necessary steps. Other times, though, I’m hard-pressed to fix the issue without actually seeing or working with the phone. A new screen sharing and remote control capability available through FaceTime can surmount that challenge. You can draw on the phone to show the other person where to go and what to do. If that doesn’t work, you’re able to assume full control of the other phone to navigate the screen, launch apps, and access settings just as if it were in your own handsAlso: How to send and receive Apple’s iMessages in WindowsThis also works with an iPad, but with some limitations. You can use an iPad to connect to and fully control an iPhone. You can also use an iPhone to connect to an iPad, but you can’t remotely control it. And you can use an iPad to connect to another iPad, but you can’t draw on the screen or remotely control it.Anyway, here’s how this works between two iPhones. How to take control of someone else’s iPhone What you need: With your iPhone and the other iPhone both running iOS 18, you can start a FaceTime call and then remotely access the other phone.  More